skygiants | Entries tagged with alyssa cole

Alyssa Cole has now written yet another novella that I like better than most or all of her full-length books -- Can't Escape Love, a tie-in to the Reluctant Royals series via Duke By Default protagonist Portia's twin sister Reggie.

The plot, such as it is: Reggie is a a wheelchair-using feminist-geek-culture website entrepreneur who's been using the puzzle-solving livestreams of old internet acquaintance Gus as a sleeping aid. When Gus shuts down his Twitch channel and the videos go offline, she reaches awkwardly out to ask for substitute recordings of his voice.

Coincidentally, puzzle-proficient Gus has just been hired to design a themed escape room for Reggie's favorite anime, a hilariously bonkers-sounding show about Sleeping Beauty at battle school. Unfortunately he Doesn't Get the Fandom Appeal and so is having trouble with the project. The descriptions of this anime were half my enjoyment of the book; it's total nonsense designed exactly to be relatable to Reggie's id and I also one hundred percent believe that it could be a real show, probably including a spinoff manga series and dating sim. God bless.

Anyway, Reggie and Gus decide to trade fandom knowledge for sleep aid vocals, rapidly develop mutual crushes, and transition from "internet friends" to "friends with benefits" to "dating."

...and that's it! That's the plot! There's some very minor drama towards the end when Reggie catches up on the much more significantly dramatic plot of A Duke By Default while Gus worries about a relationship enthusiasm gap, but it's all pretty normal relationship insecurity and is resolved rapidly and with reasonable communication.

For the record, unlike Let It Shine and Once Ghosted, Twice Shy, I don't actually think this particular novella is better than most of Alyssa Cole's other books -- there's really not a whole lot to it -- but it was such a pleasant and soothing airplane read. Just two nice people having a nice time hooking up while binge-watching an anime. My only big complaint is that we never get a full description of the final design for Gus' Sleeping Beauty Battle Escape Room. Come on! Give the people what they want! (What the people want is lovingly described nonsense-anime-based puzzles.)

(Sidenote: Reggie as aforementioned is a full-time wheelchair user, Gus is autistic, as always I am not really qualified to talk about how Alyssa Cole writes about either of these things.)

I never got around to posting about the first two books in Alyssa Cole's Reluctant Royals series last year when I read them, and felt a bit about it, but actually it's all for the best because now I've read her newest novella in the series and it is by far my favorite one so I can talk about it with unreserved enthusiasm!

The project of the Reluctant Royals series is "fun princess wish-fulfillment starring black women," which is a project I respect even when the actual romances leave me a little bit cold.

The first book, A Princess in Theory, features struggling grad student Naledi who turns out to be the long-lost betrothed of the prince of Thesolo, a small and relatively idyllic made-up African country (that according to

sophia_sol is loosely based on the country of Lesotho about which I know nothing.) Naledi discovers her long-lost family! and helps to solve a conspiracy! and gets funding for a fellowship! and I'm very happy for her even though I don't care all that much about her prince boyfriend, who is not terrible but is also not particularly great?

A Duke By Default worked for me a bit better -- this one is some enjoyable Scottish nonsense in which struggling socialite Portia decides to go to Scotland for a SWORD MAKING fellowship, and then finds out that the swordmaker is a SECRET DUKE'S HEIR, and then they strategize how to use his dukedom to help fight income inequality and gentrification while Portia learns how to cope with her ADHD! Again, the romance itself didn't quite hit all the right beats for me but I liked most of the other elements enough not to mind, although I would have liked a few more actual swords in this book that's hypothetically about swordmaking (there were some swords? But mostly the swords were overshadowed by small business design and social media development, which is cool and all except that I was promised swords!)

Once Ghosted, Twice Shy, the novella that's just come out, is a significant departure from both of these stories in that a.) lesbians! and b.) it's not really tropey nonsense at all? The former always meant that I was going to love it more; the latter is probably not related to my enjoyment, I would have loved tropey nonsense too, but it's a very different sort of story.

The protagonists of this one are Likotsi, the extremely dapper gay PA of the prince in the first book, and Fabiola, an aspiring NYC jewelry designer and internet style icon who briefly dated and then dumped her back in first-book timeline. The novella kicks off when they encounter each other by chance half a year later and spend a day wandering around New York City, with the present-day chapters unfolding through Likotsi's POV and the past from Fabiola's as we learn about the stuff that was going on in her life at the time that led her to decide that she wasn't up for a relationship. (The fact that Fab is from a Haitian immigrant family, and the place and time is contemporary New York, plays a significant role in that.)

The whole novella feels a bit like an indie movie -- one of those slow romantic films that acts as a love letter to its two-person cast and the city that it's set in -- and honestly I would watch that movie in a heartbeat, especially since it would give us visual representations of all of Likotsi and Fabiola's lovingly-described outfits. But as we're sadly unlikely to get a film, the book will also fill the purpose very nicely.

I didn't like An Extraordinary Union, the first book in Alyssa Cole's romance novel series about Civil War Spies, as much as I wanted to. I've just read A Hope Divided, the second book, and I thought it was a lot more interesting -- it makes some ambitious and unexpected choices, though I don't know if all of them necessarily work.

The premise: our heroine Marlie is the daughter of a former slave, raised since childhood by an abolitionist white woman whom she figures has to be her half-sister, although The Exact Details Are Never Spoken. She learned herbal remedies from her mother and Scientific Medicine from her studies and has a chemistry lab in the attic that she uses to support the family's Secret Pro-Union Activities, but otherwise rarely leaves the safety of home and her white family's well-meant but stifling protection, because, you know, the Civil War South.

...and her love interest, Ewan, is a Northern POW who spent the war reluctantly serving as a torture expert for the Union army.

THIS IS QUITE A CAREER FOR A ROMANCE HERO. Most of Ewan's romantic angst throughout the book is, understandably, 'I am so into Marlie and I think she should probably date someone who's not a torture expert.'

(Marlie's romantic angst, meanwhile, even more understandably: 'I am so into Ewan but it's the 1860s and trusting any white guy to be a good relationship partner seems! unwise!'

...with a brief detour after the reveal to 'I also think I should probably date someone who's not a torture expert.')

Ewan is also pretty clearly written as being on the autistic spectrum, and I do not feel particularly qualified to write about how that's handled and, in particular, the link between Ewan's autism and the fact that the Union army tapped him to be their torture guy. Either way, it does make for an interesting romance storyline that falls outside of a lot of the standard beats.

Meanwhile, the external plot -- external to the room where Ewan and Marlie spend a good half the book Tropetastically Trapped In Close Proximity while Ewan hides from the evil general who has decided to quarter himself in Marlie's house -- revolves heavily around the clash between the local soldiers and a group of deserters and draft-dodgers who have no interest in participating in the Confederate Army. Which is also an interesting and unusual choice, for a book set in the Civil War South.

I do wish there was more time to deal with all that and give some kind of resolution for Marlie's relationship with her white family, which is also interesting and complicated and then sort of gets dropped in the middle of the book after a Dramatic Revelation Smokebomb, but there IS an awful lot going on already and I can see that the plot would make this structurally difficult ....

It was extremely helpful of Rose Lerner, Courtney Milan and Alyssa Cole to jump on a pop culture zeitgeist and put out a trio of novellas right before a month in which I had a bunch of work travel and was looking for non-stressful reads; I read most of Hamilton's Battalion on a flight back from DC and it was great.

The novellas are linked together by a frame story about Eliza Hamilton's quest to Gather Reminiscences About Her Husband, although Hamilton himself actually takes up the absolute minimum amount of pages required to slap his name on the cover.

"Promised Land" by Rose Lerner features:
- a cross-dressing Jewish officer in the Revolutionary Army
- who takes her love interest prisoner when she catches him spying
- who is her EX-HUSBAND whom she FAKED HER OWN DEATH AND RAN AWAY FROM several years prior
- and then they have numerous arguments about their different relationships with Judaism and Jewish identity in colonial America while she's leading military operations and he's chained to a wall!

Rose Lerner, you didn't have to target your romance novella quite so directly to my interests. I'm super not complaining, I am A-OK being an extremely pandered-to target audience, I'm just saying it wasn't strictly necessary!

"The Pursuit of..." by Courtney Milan is about a black American soldier and a British officer who attempt to kill each other at the battle of Yorktown and then go on a ROM-COM ROAD TRIP. Their first conversation features the British officer self-deprecatingly joking about imperialism, which tells you that a.) Courtney Milan is real interested in poking at the inherent contradictions of a war For Freedom And Ideals fought between a colonial power and a slave-owning proto-nation, and b.) she is giving even fewer fucks about strict historical accuracy than usual. She is also very interested in jokes about cheese. I found this overall quite enjoyable although I was occasionally jarred by anachronisms in dialogue and by concern for the digestive health of our protagonists as they steadily ate their way through terrible un-refrigerated cheese.

"That Could Be Enough" by Alyssa Cole is about black lesbians -- one of them Eliza Hamilton's secretary who has Sworn Off Love, the other a flirtatious local dressmaker who would like to convince her to reverse that decision. It's cute and features several elements I like, including epistolary romance and a community theater production, but I wish the story did not drive the back half of its plot with a Big Misunderstanding.

I've been cleaning up transcripts for Civil War-related interviews at work recently, which reminded me I never wrote up Alyssa Cole's An Extraordinary Union.

The heroine of An Extraordinary Union, Elle Burns, is very loosely based on Mary Bowser, a historical Civil War spy with an eidetic memory who worked undercover as a slave in Jefferson Davis' Confederate White House. Unsurprisingly, all the bits that feature Elle undercover and interacting with the other slaves in the household are really excellent, I would happily read twelve different iterations on Vaguely Fictionalized Mary Bowser.

The love interest ... is fine? I honestly don't remember much about him. He's Scottish with a tragic backstory, he is also a spy, he's smitten with Elle at first sight, and as a result I spent a lot of time in the first half of the book being kind of annoyed at him because I hit that thing where I'm like 'the stakes are too high for you to be making a pass here, knock it out! go back to spying!' I prefer my romantic espionage to come with a slightly higher dose of stressed-out mistrust and refusing to act on any feelings whatsoever because The Cause Comes First, and that goes double or triple when the stakes are so very much higher for one partner than the other. Anyway, once the romance is established (and I got over my irritation with the hero for attempting to pursue a romance at all under the circumstances) the Romantic Spyjinks were also very good and the heroic self-sacrifice level rose accordingly. The second book in the series is supposed to be coming out sometime in the next few months, I think, and I will be looking out for it.

The Brightest Day: A Juneteenth Historical Romance Anthology is a collection of romance novellas by black authors focusing on celebrations commemorating the end of slavery, and it is 150% - nay, 200% - worth it for Alyssa Cole's "Let It Shine," which is now certainly in my top five and maybe in my top two romance novellas.

...this doesn't actually feel like saying that much because I tend to find romance novellas less satisfying and convincing than full-length novels overall, but "Let It Shine" is so good! The heroine, Sofie, is a black girl on the verge of joining the local chapter of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee; the hero, Ivan, is a Jewish kid whose family Sofie's mom used to work for, who trains at the local black boxing gym because the white country club won't have him, and joins the Civil Rights movement to share his training in how to take a hit.

Sofie falls into one of my favorite tropes -- the quiet, well-behaved girl whose self-control and steel spine are greater strengths than anyone around her realizes -- and the story also falls into one of my favorite romantic tropes, which is when two people fall in love working towards something that they put ahead of themselves and their romance. The novella is also really effective at building its heroic character moments around participatory movements and strategic nonviolence, which despite its historic importance is something I feel like I rarely see portrayed in fiction (especially romance, a genre in which "impulse control" is ... an infrequently valorized virtue .....)

Also, there is a sexy boxing ring scene and it's very good.

The other three novellas in the anthology didn't work for me as well, although "Let It Shine" is so good that it's not really fair to compare. My second favorite was probably Kianna Alexander's "Drifting to You," which is just a very cute, relatively unstressful story about a baker and a shipbuilder getting together on a celebratory Juneteenth cruise in 1875 that is a Professional Milestone for both of them as former slaves trying to establish businesses in the free black community. I was very concerned that the narrative tension was going to involve something going wrong with either the cake or the boat and imperil their Professional Careers, so it was a relief that the only actual plot features a cardboard villain who pops briefly up to harass the heroine and is put down again within three pages.

Lena Hart's "Amazing Grace" is about a former slave who goes out west as a mail-order bride and then falls in love with a former Confederate soldier instead, which would be a hard sell for me in almost any circumstance. I liked the heroine of Piper Huguley's "A Sweet Way to Freedom" a lot -- she's an unmarried, pregnant schoolteacher in 1910 wrestling with the damage to her reputation and her pride if she goes home to her family for support -- but I did not like the hero, the bar owner who got her pregnant and then bounced, and I think I would have needed a full book to believe in his reformation, which frequently is my problem with novellas.

Anyway! Alyssa Cole! "Let It Shine!" ABSOLUTELY WORTH IT, will be seeking out more of her stuff.